Revisionist Views of Columbus
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The 500th anniversary of the first voyage of Columbus to the New World came in 1992, and this event was an occasion for celebration in both Europe and the Americas. It was also the occasion for much bitterness and anger by revisionists who wanted to downgrade the achievement of Columbus because of a perception that his discovery of America in the long run caused more harm than good. One thing that is wrong with the revisionist view is that it holds Columbus personally responsible for all that followed his exploratory journey. In truth, the "discovery" of America was inevitable, and the subsequent events derived from the character of European culture at the time and from the personalities of the various participants, notably the Conquistadors who saw this as the occasion for looting more than discovery. However, there were ill effects because of the discovery of the New World by Columbus, and one such effect has become known as the Columbian Exchange, the exchange of diseases between the Native Americans and the Europeans, an exchange in which the Native Americans got the worst of it. After the voyages of Columbus, the geography of the world had changed with an entire new continent appearing on maps of what would soon be seen as a globe instead of a flat surface. The geography of known disease also changed as Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza found a new population with no immunity because it had had no exposure to these diseases
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was less frequent in occurrence than bubonic plague, which was fortunate because it is more virulent:
In pneumonic plague, the bacterial infection spread to the lungs, resulting in severe coughing, bloody sputum, and the relatively easy spread of the bacillus from human to human by coughing (Duiker and Spielvogel 488).
The plague arrived in Europe in October of 1347 when Genoese merchants came from the Middle East to the island of Sicily off the coast of southern Italy, bringing the disease with them. It then spread to southern Italy and southern France and Spain by the end of that year. The diffusion of the plague usually followed commercial trade routes. In 1348 the plague continued its march into France and the Low Countries and then into Germany, and by the end of that year, it had reached England. It ravaged the British isles in 1349, and by the end of that year, it had reached northern Europe and Scandinavia. Eastern Europe and Russia were next on the list in 1351, but the countries of eastern Europe were not affected as greatly as those of western and central Europe. Mortality rates for the plague were extremely high, and Italy was especially hard hit by the disease. The crowded cities of that country lost 50 to
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3319
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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